The End of the Episodic World

Lore has killed us

I’m stuck right now, deep in a pack of American Spirit Blues. Where I am is deep in Toby Fox’s Magnum Opus, Deltarune. Call me whatever woke furry slur you have for me. But it has me deep down in my thoughts.

Deltarune dropped in 2018 with a single episode that was only a few hours long. But 8 years later, we are deep into episode 5, making what was a 5 hour long tech demo into an over 30 hour jrpg deconstruction that we will be talking about extensively for the next 10 years. What has me stuck though is the episodic nature of this game. Every year or so we get a new episode that subtly hints at major plot points. It constantly and slowly teases its player base to the point that every year when a new chapter drops, a slew of content creation is made around it. Dying to discuss it and trying to be the first creator that has “figured out” the mystery. The most fascinating part being how you can watch older videos from these creators. How they lambast themselves and other creators for missing essential tidbits that can either confirm or deny their theories, years after they were shooting darts into the dark. I have no qualms with Toby’s new approach to game design. I like that his team can tweak and pry at each part until they are happy with it. Considering players have already paid for the experience. He gets the flexibility of a kickstarter while also earning the free marketing that a slow roll out provides. What hits me hard though is the constant analysis paralysis that has stemmed from the ip era of media. We are stuck in a time of “lore glut” that I find really hard to define to people that aren’t in the video essay sphere. Inundated not by the content of our media, but instead by the explanations and world building around it.

I feel like the perfect genesis of this phenomenon could be centered around content in the tumbler era. Our Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars levels of creating disgustingly bloated Fandom pages and fan “head canons” that grossly detail every second of the in media universes that these IPs have created. You only have to take a brief look at the legends timeline of Star Wars to see how much content was created around it. And then after only getting slightly involved in that community, to see the amount of third party influencer content that was created around speculating and discussing that content. Only to then see even further past that at how heavily that influenced the reception and discussions around the new Disney created Star Wars products that were set outside of the Legends universe. We are deeply stuck over analyzing the world building and the payoffs of the media we consume, instead of just taking it at face value. No longer are we really concerned about if the newest season of Game of Thrones is good, but instead what our favorite content creator has theorized about the future of the project. Maybe I’m just drunk on a glut of youtube gaming content. But it seems to me that we are more concerned about what our media will become later, instead of what it is right now. We have departed so far from the episodic nature of older era’s. Where an episode of Star Trek used to be so detached from continuity, and we only cared about what dilemma we were dealing with this week. We are now concerned about continuing timelines and hitting fat pay offs within the lore of the show.

It feels lame to say. But the actual beginning of this obsession is probably with Five Nights at Freddy’s, an indie game phenomenon that really kick started the idea of game theories and lore hunting in the nerd sphere. While the first game was a darling around the internet for its novel concept of being “Scary Chuck E. Cheese”. Every subsequent game only had interest around the lore. About what the clues were and what was coming later in the series. Entire careers were kick started around this games story, despite it really not having a story at all. Scott Cawthorn, the games creator, really was just dropping little easter eggs in every game, knowing entire communities would hype up and advertise his games for free. The games really weren’t that good. To this day, no one, including Scott Cawthorn has any definitive timeline of what happened across over 7 Five Nights at Freddy’s games. But if you search youtube for a few minutes, you will see videos discussing the lore from a decade ago that have accumulated over 100 million views. I really dare you to play a single one of these FNAF games and tell me they are fun for more than the first 5 minutes. It won’t happen. But the craze around the lore of this world has brought millions and millions of people into its sphere. The most phenomenal part of this craze to me, is that fucking none of it is good. At this point another company is now making FNAF games instead of its creator. The third party influencers consistently say the new content is not good, yet it still farms hundreds of millions of viewers around lore content every year when a new game drops. If you read the comments, NO ONE LIKES IT, but they flock to the bird feeder every year to eat the slop.

Why then Leon, are we talking about Deltarune? Its the epitome of this cancer, it’s a game that has become more about the discussions around theories and lore than the actual experience. It’s something I really can’t contend with. The truth is I have also consumed at least 60 hours of lore discussions about this game in the last month. Maybe that’s whats making me mad. Why can’t I just enjoy the game I played and put it down? Why do I need to engage with it constantly and have people explain it’s themes and more obscure ideas? I simply don’t have an answer, but what I do have is an archaic solution. The mysteries simply can’t be the idea behind these IPs anymore. The mystery can only be the catalyst to get you into a world.

I constantly tell people to this day that the best TV i’ve ever seen is David Lynch’s return to Twin Peaks. A show that was originally notorious for its mystery. And one that once got greenlit to have a reboot, was left on an even bigger cliff hanger than before. One that David never wanted to push further. Lynch insisted until his passing that the biggest mistake ever made was solving the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder back in 1991. He called the mystery his golden goose. That as long as it went unsolved, it was an excuse to hang out in that world with its characters. As always, he was right. As badly as we wanted to break down every page of Laura’s diary, to analyze every frame. The reality is that the best part of Twin Peaks was its world and having an excuse to spend time with these weird characters. I think that’s what we are missing now. The mystery is the entire point in this era. We watch super hero movies and sit until the end of the credits to see WHAT IS NEXT. We never sit and think about what we just saw instead. By only pursuing the mystery of the world, we completely lose our ability to go dreamy. Instead we look for clues and overanalyze simple things. We desperately want the answers and the conclusion to our mysteries in order to get a fat dopamine hit. But when its over and there is nothing left to solve, its even worse. We don’t even get to spend time in this world anymore, we have all the puzzle pieces and all we can do is pick them up and move them around. It seems like its paramount to being human to have a mystery. To have questions about the world. There’s so much every day we try to understand better, but the real satisfaction is getting to hang out with your friends and discuss these things on a high level. I try to imagine if God came down to me today and just explained how everything in space works perfectly to me, or what the meaning of life was. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about how their could be nothing left to yearn for. Id be appointed the head of Super Nasa or something, and then how would I have time to spend 5 hours smoking meats with my friends? Or talking to my mom on the phone about politics that won’t matter in 2 months? Imagine grabbing a slice of pizza with your buds if you knew that the universe was condensed into a resetting 1 minute time interval that only we conceive as billions of years. I don’t know if thats true, but I don’t think I’d be blotting the grease off my slice if I knew that was a fact.

Ah, back to Deltrarune again. After all this I think I can finally hit my point. I both kinda like and kind of hate this games episodic nature. I do desperately want answers to the deeper mysteries. But I feel that the intentionality behind it is completely missed by the lore hunters. We are having a blast right now. I love sitting in this world with Susie and Rals. I love the memes, I love talking about it, I love the mystery that is being slow rolled on us. As frustrating as it is sometimes to not have the answers. I almost never want them, the answers means the end of this experience. The end of the time I’m getting to spend in between the big plot points. When I think about the end of Twin Peaks, its really nothing emotionally. What hits me is the music, the title track every episode, hanging out at the morning meeting with Coop and the police with a cup of coffee. And with the way Lynch ended The Return, thats really not ever over. With the overall dreamy nature of the show, there will always be reasons to go back. New things to uncover, different interpretations to hear.

I guess what I mean is that I miss the episodic nature of things. I miss when my media didn’t always have some huge pay off that I was constantly being edged on. I loved when David Tennant was Doctor Who and every week we were just in a new place, learning small tid bits about the world instead of teasing some epic confrontation with the mega ultra bad guy of the universe. I like that about my life right now. I don’t have all the answers to anything, I never will. I just want to keep learning little bits that fascinate me daily, and hanging out with my friends. It’s frankly much better than whatever answers the world has in store for me. I hope Deltarune lasts 20 more episodes and I get to keep going to the town fair with Susie and Noelle. The lore keepers can get fucked.

What a schizophrenic mess of a write up. Can’t wait to hit post.